Lancaster man avoids jail after threatening Chesco co-workers

WEST CHESTER — A week after being found guilty of threatening to gun down co-workers at a Honey Brook manufacturing plant, a Lancaster County man was sentenced Wednesday to two years probation by a Chester County Court judge.

Common Pleas CourtSenior Judge Ronald Nagle said keeping Gregory Lee Kautz out of serving even the short time behind bars in Chester County Prison that the prosecution had suggested made sense, given Kautz’s lack of any prior criminal history and the facts of the case, in which co-workers said he made threats but that no violence actually occurred.

But Nagle agreed with Assistant District Attorney Thomas Ost-Prisco in saying that with the number of murder and shootings occurring in the nation today people like Kautz must be very careful what they say when they get angry.

”One can see how people would get upset in cases like this, in this day and age with all that we have witnessed,” Nagle told Kautz in pronouncing his sentence.

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Kautz, 45, an unemployed laborer from Ephrata, had pleaded with Nagle not to send him to prison even for the 30 days that Ost-Prisco asked for, meantime denying that he had made any threats at all to his co-workers. At his trial last week, witnesses said that he told them he was angry at being reassigned on the factory floor, and that he would at some point to get his guns, return to the factory, and shoot as many people as he could. He singled out the assistant supervisor who had switched him from one machine to another.

He allegedly said he would do so around Christmas so that the news would make the front page of the local papers. He was found guilty of one count of terroristic threats.

Calling himself a “law-abiding citizens,” Kautz told Nagle he could not understand why his co-workers at RPC Bramiage-Wiko Co. in Honey Brook would testify he had made the threats. “I can’t answer that. Only they can answer that. I did not say that. Where they came up with this I have no idea.”

Kautz, who said he was a hunter, denied obsessing about guns, and told Nagle he had no inclination to hurt anyone, even though he acknowledged that he was upset at being moved to a different operation on the floor.

“So they were wrong that you said you were going to come back and shoot someone?” Nagle asked. “I did not,” Kautz said.

In asking Nagle to treat the threats seriously, Ost-Prisco said that with the various violent episodes that the country has faced it should be understood that any talk of guns or gun violence, however slight, should be discouraged. He compared the situation to those who talk about bombs or hijackings on airline flights.

“We are on such high alert now,” Ost-Prisco said. “You just can’t go to work and say, ‘I’m going to shoot someone.’ ”

According to an arrest affidavit filed by state Trooper Daniel Covert, workers at the RPC Bramiage-Wiko Co. told him that they heard Kautz threaten to kill a supervisor, Carol Eberly, and others. One worker quoted him as saying “if they start me on another machine over here you are gonna see my tail lights, and I’m coming back shooting and Carol is my first target.”

When Covert confronted Kautz with the allegations, he denied making he threats. But in testimony, Covert also said that Kautz denied owning any guns, although records showed he had purchased four guns in Pennsylvania and had a concealed weapons permit in Lancaster. Ost-Prisco argued that his fabrications indicated a consciousness of guilt.

Defense attorney Eric Winters, representing Kautz, told Nagle on Wednesday that in addition to whatever penalty he would hand down, Kautz would suffer for the rest of his life because the conviction on the charge keeps him from possessing firearms under federal law. He has already surrendered the guns he owned to the county sheriff’s office.

“This is a complete aberration in his behavior,” Winters told Nagle. “You will never see him again.”